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The hard part about marketing and advertising...

In a previous post explaining the differences between marketing and advertising, we cleared up some of the confusion that gets business owners mixed up about what those words mean. Now we move on to part 2 and discuss what we mean when we want to distance marketing and advertising from selling. Selling is when money is given to your business by a consumer and, in exchange, you provide them with a product or service. It sounds simple enough, but it's actually the hardest task a business must face when it comes to having long-term success as a company.

What is selling and why is it hard?

Selling is everything else that happens after marketing and advertising have had their effect on your customer. And we mean everything. From the way your employees answer the phone, to what point of sale system your business uses, even the layout of your store. Whether online or in a brick-and-mortar retail store, your customers are immediately and irreparably forming an opinion about your marketing and advertising. M&A got them there and if your company doesn't deliver on a perceived promise that you made to them, they are gone; oftentimes for good!

There are a thousand big and little things that can be done to increase selling. The buying process has to be smooth, seamless, and able to work forwards and backwards. Every duck must be in its row and the customer needs to walk away with a big smile on their face. This is where an outside professional can do a lot of good for a business owner. See, business owners are pretty good at figuring out a decent marketing and advertising strategy. And it's not too hard or expensive to find someone who can give you some pointers if M&A is not your cup of tea.

But business owners are notoriously bad at spotting the selling mistakes. The little (and usually), simple things that eat away at the customer experience. A tell-tale sign of this is a business that has good sales, but very low repeat customers. The repeat customer is the easiest one to reel in. Since there are a lot of things that can be included under selling, it's too much to post in one article. But to give you an idea of what we are talking about, here are a few real-life stories about how businesses were able to out-sell their competitors:

A hotel that makes it a point to clean the snow off of every single car in the parking lot no matter how much it snowed. Imagine the guests getting in their cars and passing by the cars at other hotels that had not gotten the same treatment.

Making sure that all of the pens(or pencils) used at your establishment have ink (or are sharpened), work, and look the same.

Make sure somebody (anybody) greets every person with a smile within seconds. We see so many customers at so many businesses left alone to their own devices so long it makes us sick!

A restaurant that gives diners water, tea, or soda while they wait for a busy bartender to play catch-up

A website owner that directs a user from an online ad directly to the relative product page. Unless you have a one-page website, your ad should NEVER go to your home page.

These are simple, low-cost things that other businesses have done to increase the sales experience. As stated earlier, there is too much involved in selling to cover here. We will touch on more detailed topics in the future. But we recommend you find someone who can, as an outsider, evaluate the customer experience. Most businesses are lacking in this area and it is something that business owners rarely have a pulse on. The most successful business owners we know are the ones that will readily admit they don't know everything about their business and are always trying to get feedback from others. We are all biased when it comes to our own management skills and the way we look at our companies...all of us are!

A business dictionary lesson on marketing, advertising, and selling

We hear those three words used interchangeably a lot. And the people that use them together are doing it wrong. Each of those things are different in so many ways. Larger companies have entire departments that focus on each one separately. Unfortunately, small business usually don't have the resources to split these categories, much less understand how much each one affects their bottom line.

Marketing

Marketing is the aura of your business. It is the feeling that customers get from using what you've got and the energy you emit to the world. It is something that can be spun into what you want it to say. Think of it as a form of PR. With clever marketing, you can take something concrete and measurable about your business and put it out there as a sensation, a taste, or anything your customers hearts may desire. McDonald's does this all the time. They stopped trying to sell the food and the ingredients a long time ago. Now they sell you on the feeling..."I'm Lovin' it!". A house cleaning company may make a commercial about a family spending the day at the zoo and eating ice cream. It has nothing to do with cleaning houses, but they want you to get the feeling of being with your family by not having to clean your house this weekend. They are marketing the feeling instead of the cleaning!

Marketing is also your branding: from the logo design to the color of the walls on the sales floor. These things also help with the feeling that your business emotes. A nice clean logo with pleasing colors is more attractive to most people as opposed to bold-faced and black font type. How your employees dress is also a form of marketing. You could spend every dime of profit you earned on something to do with marketing and no matter how profitable you were, could still find something else to spend on marketing. And the worst part is that with all this money you're spending, it's the hardest area of your business to know what money is being best spent where. Unless you hook up with an industry pro...it's almost a guessing game until you find something that works.

Advertising

Advertising is something you do to get them into your store, visiting your website, or calling your phone. It's the 'call to action' you always hear about. It's getting your customer to connect to the marketing that you provided them; sometimes together, sometimes separate. Advertising is the sign on the back of the bus bench and the commercials you see on television. They are the click ads online and the announcement on a PA system in the store letting customers know about a new sale.

Advertising is the money you spend with newspapers, radio stations, magazines, websites, television, etc. Like marketing, it's sometimes hard to track successes and failures. Most businesses we work with are terrible at advertising metrics. You'll never know if the person who bought your new thingamajig did so because they saw it on the back of a magazine cover at the dentist office unless you ask. And most business owners don't ask. Of course there is this awesome thing called internet advertising that is super easy to track as long as it's set up by a professional who knows what they are doing. The same thing goes for your website, which handles marketing, advertising, and yes...selling.

And now the catch...

Here's the part that most business owners don't take into account. Marketing and Advertising are cost centers. THEY GENERATE ZERO REVENUE! Yes, I said it. Zero, none, zilch, nothing. There is not a single marketing or advertising campaign that makes that little *ding* noise on the cash register. And this is where most businesses have the disconnect. They get all warm and fuzzy inside because they placed an ad in the phone book or got that billboard by the freeway they always wanted.

Big deal, who cares? It's great that they saw your advertising, and that your marketing triggered a reaction from them. But getting them on the phone doesn't ring the cash register. John Doe typing your website address into his browser is not a swipe of the credit card. That's where selling comes in! And it's a big bad monster. It's the big, gaping hole we see in most businesses; especially smaller ones.

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